


Material Witness—Perpetual [Watershed, 5 x 24, Poof! You're Dead! 3 x12, Reality Star Struck 5 x 14]

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Material Witness [12]
Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 11:57:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1817659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He's not the one who should be trying to make this ok."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Material Witness—Perpetual [Watershed, 5 x 24, Poof! You're Dead! 3 x12, Reality Star Struck 5 x 14]

**Author's Note:**

> This one took a strange turn and ended up more or less entirely from Kate's perspective. I think this is Brain's way of tricking me into telling post-Watershed lies. Not sure how well this one works and it feels weird that almost all the story of how Castle came to have the gift got edited out.
> 
> This is the eleventh story in this series. They're loosely linked one-shots that can be read independently and in any order you like.

She wakes to unfamiliar dark and a throbbing toe. It takes her longer than it should to remember that she's home. This is home now. Her bed and sheets and everything, even if the air feels wrong and the dark is unfamiliar. This is home.

She moves past the annoyance that it's something that it still takes time to remember. Past the feeling in the pit of her stomach that she won't call sadness. She moves on to her toe. The pain is incredible. It would have to be to wake her these days.

The hours are long, the work is grueling in a peculiar way, and however unfamiliar the dark is, she falls immediately into dreamless sleep every night. Every night or whenever it is that she happens to make it over her own threshold, the dreamless sleep is a given. A mercy. Respite from the feeling that isn't sadness.

_Threshold._

The word and the pain radiating up through her ankle focus her attention. The box. She must have kicked off her shoes in the dark and walked right into that fucking box. Again.

She throws off the bedding and her whole body seizes up in the cold. The links of recent memory pull taut. She can't remember what time it was when she finally stumbled in, only that the walk through the pitch black from car to building had left her soaked with sweat. Only thinking that the landlord still hasn't dealt with the security lighting. Only wondering for the thousandth time in seven weeks whose brilliant idea it was to move the nation's capital to a swamp.

 _Tidal plain_.

She presses a palm to her stomach and wills that particular memory away. His voice. His helpful, superior, annoying voice, desperate and bright and chattering with interesting facts about her new home. Dispelling myth. It's like punctuation on how wrongeverything is. How backward and upside down and _wrong._

He doesn't do that. He's not the one who corrects _her_ with facts. He's the one who waves her off when she insists on precision. Who argues that _swamp_ is a better word. He talks about monosyllables and plosives and how mouth feel matters more than dry truths. He scoffs that no one knows what a tidal plain is anyway, and swamp makes for a better story.

He's supposed to be the one to do all of that.

He's not the one who should be talking her into this. He's not the one who should be saying that it's not so bad. That the air is just as hot and thick in New York, and her old landlord never did fix it so she could turn off the kitchen sink entirely without a wrench. That the dark won't be unfamiliar forever. That she'll settle in. That before she knows it, she'll wake up knowing she's home.

He's not the one who should be trying to make this ok.

She presses the heel of her hand hard against the soft emptiness of her abdomen. She doesn't think she's eaten today. Not since breakfast, anyway, and that was half a stale "bagel" from the break room.

She swings her feet to the floor. Winces as the pain twines around her shin and up through the back of her calf. She needs something for the it, but knows anything she tries is likely to come right back up with nothing on her stomach.

She stands swaying in the middle of the darkened bedroom, undecided and shivering.

_Shivering._

She hobbles to the overworked window unit and cranks it down. The dull white roar cuts out, and the room fills with the noise of traffic. Like the heat, the traffic never lets up and it's somehow louder than New York. Stranger and more intrusive. Another unfamiliar thing about the dark here.

The shivering dies down. The heat is seeping in through the poorly insulated windows already, and she can't remember if she left the unit running in the living room. Can't remember if she paused to hiss against the pain in the dark or not.

She limps through the bedroom door now and straight into a wall of warm, moist air that grabs her empty stomach and tugs it down and down. She's the furthest thing from hungry.

She thinks about turning around. About crawling back into bed in the hopes that sleep will come again, but the pain in her foot has different ideas. She makes her way slowly into the kitchen, twisting the air conditioner's reluctant dial along the way.

She's not sure why she goes for the freezer. She wants something to ice her foot, and apparently she's expecting a bag of frozen peas to appear by magic. Apparently she's expecting to find something other than the half-eaten pint of ice cream that was its sole occupant the last time she can remember opening the damned thing.

She does.

It's not brimming, by any means, but there are few frozen dinners, some veggie burger patties and a couple of packs of buns of some kind. The old pint is gone and there are half a dozen in a variety of flavors in its place. And the ice cube trays are topped off.

It's what does her in: The ice cube trays are topped off.

She sinks on to a stool at the breakfast bar and lets the tears roll down her face as she works her way mechanically through half a pint of her favorite flavor. It's hardly crying. It doesn't feel like crying. It starts and stops on its own and she feels exactly as terrible at the end as she did when it started. Like the tears having nothing to do with her.

After a clumsy trial-and-error search, she finds ziplock bags in a small pull-out cabinet she's not sure she knew existed. She stands at the sink with the tray and it's a long, lonely moment in the unfamiliar dark before she can bring herself to crack the plastic spine and catch the shower of ice in the bag's wide mouth.

She runs the empty tray under a gentle stream at the sink. Fills each compartment to exactly the same height. She sets the tray carefully back in the freezer and makes her hobbling way back down the hall.

She turns into the bathroom and hates the sticky feel of linoleum under her feet. She yanks open the medicine cabinet, half expecting it to be empty. Knowing it's not. She breaks the seal on a bottle of ibuprofen and downs a handful with a swallow of water from the Batman toothpaste cup that showed up during one of his visits.

She didn't notice until after he'd left. Has no idea how many days or weeks it might have been there on the edge of the sink before then. Can't really remember if she thanked him for it.

She crawls directly on to the bed. Doesn't bother with the blankets. The room is already too warm again, and she knows there's no way she won't fall asleep with the ice pack on her foot anyway. She drops it with a little too much force on her injured foot and hisses as she sinks back against the pillows.

She has barely enough energy to reach for her phone. Barely enough energy to make sense of the stupid security measures to unlock it and call up his contact information. Barely enough energy to tap out a text before she's unconscious again: _Thank you._

She wakes the next morning to unfamiliar sunlight with the phone still in her hand and a sodden mess of lukewarm bedding tangled around her feet. The pain in her foot has receded to a dull throb and the swelling has gone down enough that she thinks she'll be able to get into half-decent shoes.

The phone in her hand is lit up with half a dozen notifications. His is the first: _For you, anything._

* * *

She stands at the edge of the sea of desks and thinks for a moment that they've done another fucking re-org. She counts over from the window and across from the doorway and it takes her more than a moment to realize that her desk is right where she left it too few hours before. It takes her more than a moment to recognize the featureless expanse as having anything to do with her.

She nods to the few people who make eye contact. Most of them nod back. She exchanges a word or two with a few more, and tries not to limp. She had ice cream and another icepack for breakfast. That and a second handful of ibuprofen have the pain ratcheted back again, but the shoes might have been ambitious.

Ambitious, but she wanted them. The familiar distance from the ground. The well-known alignment of thigh and calf. Heel and toe propelling her over asphalt and terrazzo in sure strides. Ambitious, but something of herself and she wanted that today.

She settles into her chair and it all starts over. She chips away at the project she left off on the night before, the starting point as arbitrary as the ending. She moves paper from in to out. She gets her inbox down to triple digits and takes her turn in a dozen or so games of phone tag.

She is polite and efficient. She checks things off her to-do list. She answers the phone to people who sound annoyed that she isn't her own voice mail, and the morning passes almost before she knows it. She has the nagging feeling that she hasn't accomplished much. Nothing, maybe, even though her wrists ache and she must have at least one paper cut on every single finger.

She's thinking about lunch. Whether it's better to face the heat or a limp salad from the cafeteria. If a glimpse of the sun is worth ten minutes in a bathroom stall blotting the sweat from her skin before it can soak through her blouse. Her gaze skips over the bent heads around her and she wonders if she should even take lunch. If she's supposed to. If people _do._

She doesn't know.

It's been seven weeks and she doesn't know.

She doesn't know if there's anything other than godforsaken chain places within walking distance. If there's a watering hole they call their own. If people _do_ that.

She sees people come and go with brown bags from the break room and take-out containers on their desks. The cafeteria is never full, but it's not empty, either, and she'd swear she's never seen any one person leave for more than 15 minutes at a time.

She sees people eat together or chatting by the elevator in twos and threes, but not often the same people. It's not just that she's the new guy. No one seems particularly close. She doesn't know who gets along and who doesn't. If there are rivalries or love affairs gone wrong.

She has no idea if anyone is married. There are wedding rings, but not many, and she'd swear they come and go. Or maybe it's the people who do.

She doesn't know them. If they have families. Where they came from before they landed in this strange sea of sameness where no one ever borrows a pen or tells an off-color joke and her standard-issue stapler is always exactly where she left it.

There's nothing on her desk that isn't functional. That wasn't issued to her. No elephants or candy dish or pad full of doodles. No set of his and hers pens because they are wildly pen incompatible. No half-dead dry erase markers. Her standard-issue coffee mug has the DOJ seal on it. So does everyone else's.

There's nothing on _anyone's_ desk. Not really. No photographs or fetishes or tchotchkes. There's the occasional American flag in a pen cup, criss-crossed with the DC flag for a few of the daring. She'd swear that someone had a stylish little analog clock her first week. Something bright brass with a happy, solid tick, but it's gone now.

Whether or not the owner is gone with it, she has no idea. There's a lot of turnover and what sometimes feels like constant reorganization. The investigative team has held steady so far, but she spends a lot of time having the same conversations with new counterparts in other units.

Someone is an enthusiastic fan of the open office plan, and there's little rhyme or reason to the layout. To whose blank, impersonal desk is near whose or where anyone might find anyone else on a particular team.

It's not that people are unfriendly. They exchange pleasantries. She asks questions and sometimes they'll blink as if they're surprised she doesn't know. But they answer politely. They're helpful when asked. They offer more than she knew to wonder about sometimes and things seem less strange. A little less strange.

No one is unfriendly. There's painstaking attention to courtesy and cooperation within teams. There's also posturing and competition between them, but even that's polite and she hasn't had time to run afoul of it.

Well, not much time.

Stack has "dropped by" her desk a couple of times. Stack is the only one who has ever dropped by her desk or anyone else's desk as far as she can tell. It's not a dropping-by kind of place. It's not the kind of place where coworkers scoot across the aisle on their desk chairs to share something on a monitor or listen in on speaker phone.

So Stack's dropping by is noteworthy, especially as they've hardly worked together since she started. But he's made more than a few sidelong remarks about the usual ways of doing things and the need for clear and appropriate information flow. He's let her know that she's stepping on toes without giving her much of an idea whose or how. He's given her warnings, and if they're not quite friendly, they're not unfriendly either.

No one is unfriendly.

No one is anything.

And there is absolutely nothing on anyone's desk.

* * *

The fight is tremendous.

She's late.

She has a "mission-critical" call scheduled for late in the day by a contact on another team. She waits ten minutes past the time on her calendar. One of Stack's helpful hints had clued her into the fact that who calls whom is important for some reason. She gets the contact's his voicemail. His voicemail, which declares him to be out of the office until the end of the week.

But even with the time it takes to send a politic email in which she manages _not_ to use the phrase "What the actual fuck?" she still leaves early. Maybe she leaves early. She doesn't know when people are "supposed" to leave any more than she knows if they go to lunch.

At any rate, she leaves early enough that she thinks there's more than enough time to hit the one Chinese place she's found— _he's_ found, actually—that isn't a complete and utter failure and be back at the apartment in time for their phone call.

It's not. It's not early enough. It's not plenty of time. She gets caught on the wrong side of a motorcade and traffic absolutely crawls for the last few miles to her place.

It's full dark as she hustles toward her building. She's late and she hasn't eaten and the phone is ringing when she stumbles across the threshold.

It's the land line. She's been wondering why her cell has been stubbornly silent, but of course he'd remember that she gets terrible cell reception inside the apartment. It's the land line. She can't remember where she left the damned cordless handset. She's late and she wonders how many times he's called already. How many patient times he's hung up before it went to voice mail and tried again.

She sees the handset on the console table and lunges for it. She kicks the box along the way, and even though she's wearing shoes, it's agony.

She says his name through her teeth and there's this pause—this hesitation. He asks if it's a bad time, like he's a fucking telemarketer and that is just _it._ For her, that is just _it._

She sees red. It's not a metaphor. Her blood is pounding behind her eyes and she's screaming at him. Terrible things about how passive–aggressive he's being. That he hasn't said a thing in two months that isn't a complete fucking lie. She screams terrible things and every single one feels like the last thing she'll ever say to him, but she can't stop. She can't stop.

She's screaming at him and he's screaming back. Except he doesn't scream. He's all quiet, controlled fury in a voice so cold she can't even attach it to the man she knows. The man whose bed she shared for a year and whose heart she knows she's had for longer than that.

He says terrible things, too. Awful accusations in a dead, cutting undertone. That she's been trying to manipulate him since she flew out for the interview. Trying get him to end things so she can spend the rest of her life vindicated and alone. That she's the same coward she was two years ago when Montgomery died.

It's tremendous. It goes on and on. It builds and builds and he _is_ screaming then.

She tastes black satisfaction when he finally raises his voice. When he's finally shouting loud enough that she can hear it rattling the glass in his office, and he asks what she wants him to say. If she wants him to hang up for the last time or give her an ultimatum. If she wants to hear that it's over if she doesn't come home right the fuck now to settle down and have fat children with him.

She snorts.

It's a repulsive sound. She's been choking back sobs and her nose is streaming and she snorts.

 _Fat children_.

The storm breaks with it. The phrase and the unattractive sound from her.

She goads him about how fat these children will be. Why he _anticipates_ fat children when she knows that Alexis was about the size of a kitten. When she knows that he obsessed over how tiny she was until she went to junior high.

They laugh weakly together about how many fat children there will be and what they'll name them. They discuss what kind of sports teams they might field with this mighty army of fat children.

It's ridiculous.

It's another evasion.

It's enough for the moment.

It's a respite and they make their way back to something else that's quieter if not more kind. Apologies for some things. Softened words for other things. Things each of them stands firm on.

He asks if she wants to come home and she won't let him correct himself. She won't let him take back the word, because this _isn't_ home. She might stay. He thinks she should, even though he hates it. She thinks she needs to, even though she hates it. But it's not home.

They talk about that. Why it is, and he reminds her that she spent a long time at twelfth. That what she has there didn't happen over night and it never happens for some. That there are people who don't have anything on their desk. Whose partners aren't family.

He reminds her, and she warns him not to make excuses. That she's so fucking sick of him trying to make this ok. He says he's not. That he hates saying any of it and he can't stand to see her miserable. He hates everything about this job and the way she handled it. The way they've both been handling it. He hates that New York isn't home anymore. Without her, it's not home, but he's not making excuses for DC, either.

They talk about what to do with that. What they _can_ do. What's possible and reasonable and too much. They don't have any answers. Neither of them has any answers.

It all goes on and on, too, and even though it's better at the end—it's a _lot_ better—she feels like everything has been pulled out of her. She's exhausted in a new way and everything hurts.

It's the talk they should have had two months ago. It's the conversation they should have had on the swings. It's all the things they should have tackled head on months before that. It's everything they've failed at. It's note even the half of it. It's not even that much, but it's something.

They hang up a long time later and she can't sleep. For the first time in seven weeks, she can't sleep.

She doesn't give it much time. She doesn't linger in the unfamiliar dark. She knows the signs. She's exhausted down to the last nerve fiber, but she won't sleep. She throws off the covers and shivers in the cold. She snaps off the bedroom air conditioner and twists on the one in the living room on her way to the kitchen.

She grabs a pint of ice cream, a spoon, and a utility knife. She drops cross-legged to the floor in front of the box and slices through the packing tape. Right through the block letters: OFFICE.

* * *

She has to dig for it.

She has to pull out the heavy arc of elephants and set them aside with an apology. A decision that they'll live here now. They'll live on a window sill or an end table and the dark and light will feel a little less unfamiliar.

She has to make a pile of the various notes and doodles. Things she couldn't bear to throw away when she filled this box that last day.

A caricature of Gates she'd found smoothed and taped down in the very back of her drawer when she'd come back from her father's cabin. A sketch of Montgomery in profile. Neither of them can remember when he did that one.

He's a terrible artist. Terrible. But these capture something true about their subjects and she couldn't bear to throw them away.

She doesn't know what she'll do with them. She thinks about colorful magnets and the refrigerator. Not like her at all. Like kindergarten art, but she might like it. It might remind her of old friends and fat children and him. She makes a pile.

She lifts out a mug and her chest feels tight. It's plain. Nothing special and something she had long before him, but it has the weight of his fingerprints now. The sheltering curve of his palm and she wonders how many coffees it is now. How many she owes him. She sets it aside for the moment. It's too much right now. It's too much in the unfamiliar dark, and she wants this thing. This particular thing.

She finds it tucked away safe. She's not entirely sure how it ended up in this box.

It was never on her desk. It was something for home. Something he'd see and _tsk_ about when she let the rocks glass full of water run dry. He'd refill it and set things to rights on the ledge in the bedroom. Insist that she be the one to lay a heavy fingertip on the flat velvet of the purple top hat and set him going.

She doesn't know how it ended up with her office things. It was always for home. Her Valentine's Day present. Not the real one. Not the first or the second, but something from the closet.

* * *

_She's annoyed with him. Not just about the debacle with the earrings, though that, too._

_He's over the moon about the drawer. Over the moon, and it makes her chest tight in at least three different ways._

_He insists they have to stay at her place the next night. He insists, but he wants to stop by the loft first, even though it takes them forever to get out of the precinct. To dot the_ I _s and cross the_ T _s with him 'helping.' Even though it's late and she's tired and wants to be out of her heels and into her oldest yoga pants. He wants to stop at the loft and he wants to stay at her place._

 _He needs_ things, _he says._

_He needs a moleskine and one of his ridiculously overpriced pens for the drawer. Like he doesn't have the same damned thing in some pocket or other at any given moment._

_He needs three of his favorite shirts to sleep in. Three of her favorite shirts to steal._

_He needs the pink, fuzzy handcuffs that she's told him_ no _about a hundred times. She's told him no and pretended not to notice as he steals her own set._

_She's tired and he's taking his time about the whole thing. She's half asleep on the foot of the bed when he emerges from the closet with his hand outstretched. When he turns the silver-wrapped box over to her with a shy kind of flourish and tells her it's a Valentine's Day present._

" _Not the real one," he amends quickly. "But something in the mean time."_

_He lets her work on the bow for once. He sits next to her and piles things into the leather duffel bag while her fingers tug experimentally. She breaks it in the end and it makes him grin. It makes him lean in and slide and impatient kiss along her jaw._

_The box is a little the worse for wear. The corners are crushed and the retro packaging is criss-crossed with violent-looking scratches._

_She looks from the box to him and back again. He's still now, but keeps quiet even though she can practically see the story buzzing around in his mouth. He wants her to guess. He wants her to tell her part._

" _A drinking bird?" She says it out loud and there's a question mark at the end._

" _Drake's," he says, and it's an effort not to go on. She can see that it's an effort. That he's prompting her with something that's barely silence._

_He's prompting her, but she's still not getting it. Why he picked this up. Why he wrapped it and slotted it into the reverent pile of things he's never given her._

" _The magic shop," she says slowly. "Why did they even have this?"_

" _Because it's magic." He rolls his eyes. He's still an amateur, but it's a good effort. It approaches some lower-level Beckett eye rolls. "Perpetual motion."_

" _It's_ physics _," she shoots back and she gets it then._

_He knows she does. He gives an affronted sniff to hide his grin. "Any sufficiently advanced technology . . ."_

" _Is science," she finishes. She stabs at the box. Underlines the words with an emphatic finger. " 'The classic scientific wonder.'_ Scientific _, Castle."_

_He lunges at her, then. She holds it high above her head and the duffel bag tumbles to the floor. He catches her. She lets him and they fall together, loud and clumsy and laughing. Half undressed and perfect. Physics and magic._

_She tells him a story afterward. As they lay there panting and she knows he still wants to go to her place. That he still wants to fill up his drawer and spend the first night there with it. She gives him another gift, too. She tells him a story._

" _Thermodynamics," she says._

" _Beckett." He groans against her. He rumbles into her skin. "God. You have to give me, like, 45 minutes before you start back in with the five-syllable words."_

" _Shut up." She pinches his side and he lets out a high-pitched squeak. "I'm telling a story."_

" _Mmm. Make it a 45-minute story." He opens his mouth against her neck and it's almost a no-minute story._

" _Second-semester chemistry." She stutters it out and he pauses. He lets up a little because he wants the story like always. "Thermodynamics. The professor brought one of these in."_

_She reaches for the box on the night stand. He takes advantage. Palms on bare skin and more of his weight shifted on to her. Keeping her close. But he lightens his touch again as she brings the box to rest on her chest and tilts her chin down at it. He wants the story._

" _He brought one of these in and an aquarium. He put the bird inside with a glass of water. He started it up and then closed the top. No explanation. Just went into his lecture."_

_He's quiet. His fingers busy themselves along her ribs as he thinks it over. "It stopped, right?"_

_She nods. "Closed system. It stopped."_

" _Jerk." He blows a raspberry against her shoulder. "Professor. Not you."_

" _He started it back up again." She laughs and swats him away. "Just kept on lecturing. Opened the aquarium and dunked his beak and let it go for the rest of the period."_

" _Still a jerk," he mutters and her chest is tight again._

_It still catches her off guard. She's so used to his joy. His readiness to smile and laugh and see magic in simple things. But the joy goes as quickly as it comes. He guards it, but the world is hard and sometimes it goes anyway._

_She kisses him. "Not a jerk. You'd have liked him. He carried this enameled metal briefcase. Royal blue like a cookie tin with these fairytale panels painted on it."_

" _But he ruined it." He's whining now. It's exaggerated and over the top. The joy isn't really gone. "He ruined the magic."_

" _He didn't," she insists. She kisses him. Bites his lip for emphasis. "It's still magic. Sufficiently advanced."_

" _I guess that's ok then," he grumbles._

_He nods off. So does she. It's more than 45 minutes when she wakes him up. When she lures him out of the bed with five-syllable words and he gives sleepy chase as she gathers up his tumbled things and tosses them back into the duffel bag._

_He snatches her around the waist and says it's fine. It's fine if they sleep here tonight, but she buttons him up and drags him through the office. Through the living room and out the door._

_She wants to fill up his drawer and spend their first night with it._

* * *

It feels like crying. She tips the slender glass body out of the box into her hand. She curls the bulge of it in her palm and tips the bright liquid back and forth. Something releases. So much of the bad of the last seven weeks lets go. It leaves her. It feels like crying, but her eyes are finally dry.

She sets the bird on the hall table. She sets the box nearby. She fetches the Batman cup from the bathroom and fills it with water. She touches a finger to the flat velvet of the purple top hat. She tips the heavy red head and watches. Perpetual motion even after she falls asleep.

She wakes the next morning, stiff and sore and empty feeling. Empty but not hollow. She eats. Toast, because there's bread surviving in the fridge and peanut butter because she wants to feel full again. She makes a grocery list and texts him for the address of the nearest store. Not the nearest. The one that's better because it's open later and it has a real produce section. She remembers him telling her.

She remembers, but he floods her phone with helpful suggestions. She texts him back. Tells him to knock it off or there'll be no fat children.

He texts her one last thing. A picture of of an immensely, comically fat baby.

She finds a shoebox. She fills it. She stops the bird and tells him it's just for now. She slides him back into his own box and sets it along side the handful of things she's decided on. Her chipped blue mug. The batman tumbler. The first dirty limerick he ever left her.

She'll tape that inside her drawer. She'll fill her own mug every morning and wash it out every night. She'll use the standard-issue mug for pens. Hers and the one or two of his she found in the box. She'll keep the tumbler topped off and the bird will have a place of honor. In between her phone and the stapler that's always exactly where she left it.

The bird will do the rest. Physics and magic. Sufficiently advanced and indistinguishable.

_Perpetual motion._

  



End file.
